Lord Bird
Main Page: Lord Bird (Crossbench - Life peer)
Lord Bird (CB)
My Lords, I come here to talk about poverty—the poverty of our streets, the poverty of our libraries and the poverty of our bookshops. If we do not sort out our libraries and bookshops, and if we turn our high streets into places that are denuded of bookshops and our libraries are closed down, we will have a real problem in other areas.
When government departments cut budgets in one particular area, it tends to find a manifestation in another area. For instance, if you start cutting the number of libraries—we have lost more than 500 since 2010—you are building up a bill that will occur in another part of government. It will be shifted into disorder, crime, problems for schools and the fact that children will not be able to get a job because they will not have the skills and abilities. So if you wish to cut libraries, please do so—but do it on the basis that you build more prisons and more hostels for homeless people and put higher walls around your house. It is not just this Government or the previous Government or the Government before that; it will be the Government again. There seems to a real problem about understanding budgets.
If a department cuts support for local authorities, the local authorities are put into a situation where they then ask, “How can we save some money?”. So what do they do? They cut libraries. As I have said, more than 500 have been cut and nearly 9,000 librarians have gone in the past five years. That is in spite of the fact that in 1964 a law was passed making it a statutory requirement for local authorities to provide a proper library system. That was their duty—so how can you lose 500 libraries? How can you cut 21 libraries, as the county of Lancashire is looking to do? Mr Ben Wallace, an MP there, has raised the question of court action. How can you have a situation where we do not ring-fence libraries because we are not taking into account what will happen around literacy and association?
A lot of people are learning on their own; that is increasing. You have broken the communal sense of people learning in groups. The fewer libraries you have, the more people are studying on the internet and by themselves. But they really need association. There are many uses of libraries. The fact is that you can go into a library and feel the knowledge and the history. When I was a young boy, I could not read or write but I would go to the library and just sniff the books and that feeling of knowledge. I would say, “One day, this will be mine. All I’ve got to do is go to prison at some stage, where they will teach me to read and write”—which is exactly what they did.
Libraries are essential, yet what is happening is that they are being cut. I recommend that Her Majesty’s Government supply some emergency relief money to stop local authorities doing this dastardly deed, this process of philistinising our communities. That is one thing they must do. Another thing they must do is make sure that every school in the country has a library. Many schools do not. Think again. As I said earlier, if we make a saving here, we will make a loss elsewhere. Health, sociability, work and all other issues will come into play. I beg us all, before we allow another library to be lost or librarian laid off, to think seriously, “Is this a saving?”. I wrote an article for the Big Issue a few years ago in which I said that the problem with austerity is that it is too expensive. It is so expensive but does not look it. It looks like you have a saving and then you move on.
If we save our libraries, what about our high streets? What about the fact that we are losing bookshops? We have lost more than 450 since 2010. What do we do with bookshops? What are they? Bookshops are places where you buy books. They raise the intellectual temperature of a city, a neighbourhood or an area. If you go to places such as Hay-on-Wye—even though it has been knocked by the Amazonian revolution, which I will return to—or Wigtown on the Scottish border, where they have a book festival every year, it is like going to Mecca. We all love books. We all want to read books and we all buy many more than we can read. It is an insatiable appetite because we realise the importance of books and literature.
What do we get when it comes to the bookshop? Interesting data were given to me, not directly, by Mr Richard Fuller, the Conservative MP for Bedford. He wanted to know why a bookshop trading on the high street in Bedford pays £850 a square metre in rates while somebody also selling books 11 miles away pays £50 a square metre. The first is a bookshop—I think it is Waterstones—which has to up its game, sell many more books and look for all the savings it can to pay that enormous amount of money. Then, 11 miles away on some kind of trading estate, there is a vast place, as vast as the 13 or 14 others that the company has, which pays 50 quid a square metre.
When I spoke to the noble Lord, Lord Ashton, about this, he rightly made the point that we cannot get the Government fiddling around—he did not use that term; I am paraphrasing—with the marketplace, which needs to be self-regulating and should be allowed to get on with it. But the fact is that, before the bookshop in Bedford has sold one book, the ground is uneven. The ground is so uneven that the bookshop must put more effort in. Meanwhile, the other company can sell a book and it can go out from the warehouse and zoom around the world wherever it is directed. That is not fair competition.
Another interesting fact is that a lot of these Amazon warehouses are run militarily. Amazon denied recently that it used zero-hours contracts. I would like to look into that and see the evidence. It denied that its staff were run ragged rushing around and said that they were being trained up to be more skilled in the work. But Amazon has another advantage because it has lots of cheap labour. You will find that many of these warehouses are in areas where there is no other work.
Another advantage is that, in 2014, Amazon paid in the region of £11 million for activity in the United Kingdom of £5 billion. It paid that in Luxembourg. If any one of us in this House were to spend £1 anywhere in the United Kingdom, we would expect part of it to go to the Inland Revenue—or whatever they call it now. You would expect that, would you not? But by some magic process, a lot of that activity gets removed and a lot of the money ends up somewhere else. The British pound is converted, I presume, into a US dollar and ends up in Seattle.
Bookshops are an essential part of the community. If we are to do anything about them, we will have to look upon them as a cultural resource. We will have to look upon them as precious. A hundred years ago, most of the people I know who work in and run bookshops would probably have been working in the Church or something like that. I do not want to exaggerate but there is something sacred and spiritual about working in a bookshop. That is the impression I get. When I talk to these people, I am struck by their enthusiasm and absolute commitment to books. I have never been in a bookshop where the person actually wants to be a butcher or to be doing some other job. It is somebody who has a job and is task-oriented. They raise the culture.
I started The Big Issue 25 years ago. We are having our 25th birthday event on 19 October. I invite noble Lords and noble Baronesses to come along—it is not a fundraiser—and look at what we have done and what we are going to do. There are a lot of very exciting things. One of the reasons I started it was my absolute commitment to literacy. I am not talking about just the literacy of books but social literacy—the literacy of being together, of working together, of loving each other, rather than being against each other in whatever way. Since I started The Big Issue we have put an enormous effort into literacy, probably under my influence because I spent the first 16 years of my life unable to read and write and I had to rely on Her Majesty’s Prison Service to teach me how.
All the work I have done is about literacy and social literacy. Let us defend the bookshops. Let us make bookshops work. Let us reverse the process. Let us not allow a situation where a behemoth has grown among us—Amazon—which sells 97% of all our e-books. If Amazon were a newspaper, it would be in a monopoly position and we in both Houses would be all over it. I beg to move.
Lord Bird
My Lords, that was a very interesting trawl through all the reasons why libraries and bookshops are not fluffy. They are not some little thing that you can add to society when you have a few bob in your back pocket. It is interesting that, as was explained by all speakers today, we see libraries and bookshops as the very intellectual backbone of society. I will be carrying on, in my itchy sort of way. I would like to think from what the Minister has said that we will see a turnaround and a reversal of their slow decline. I thank noble Lords.